unfinished nose, and small eyes turned down at the corners. Colleen had Adam’s dark brown eyes, but everything else was more angular: sharply pointed chin and nose, inclined eyebrows, rigid mouth. They both seemed to have used the same drugstore hair dye, a shade of red that stripped their short hair of any sheen.
Olivia stuffed her hands in the pockets of her trench coat. Her fingers brushed a crumpled tissue and the edge of her cell phone. “Adam used to talk about how hard both of you worked to keep him in voice lessons,” she said. “He felt guilty about it.”
Brenda’s insignificant chin came up. “We didn’t regret a moment of it.”
A pot banged in the back of the bakery. Colleen splayed her hands against her apron. “He was always good to us. Always.”
Olivia knew Adam frequently sent them money, although if he was short of cash, the money had come from Olivia. When he’d died, Olivia had made a private arrangement with the funeral home to take care of the expenses. The sisters believed Adam’s last opera company had paid for it.
She stepped closer to the counter and pointed stupidly toward the bakery case. “I’ll take whatever you have left.” She had no money on her. She’d left her purse in the car.
“We’re not selling to you,” Colleen said.
Olivia’s chest tightened. Even if she’d been standing on one foot with Thad holding her other foot, she wouldn’t have been able to get a note out. “I couldn’t make Adam happy,” she finally said.
“You broke his heart!” Brenda cried.
“I didn’t mean to.” Only in retrospect did Olivia see that Adam was suffering from depression. She remembered how difficult it had become for him to memorize a new libretto. The way his periods of insomnia had alternated with nights he’d sleep for twelve or thirteen hours. If only she’d gotten him to a doctor.
Colleen whipped around from behind the counter, her sharp features vicious. “You always had to come first. It was always Olivia this, Olivia that. It was never about him.”
“That’s not true. I did everything I could for him.”
“All you did was rub your success in his face,” Brenda retorted.
That wasn’t true, either. Olivia had made herself smaller for him, giving up her own practice time, downplaying her achievements, but there was no point in arguing with them. No point to this visit. “I’ve been getting some ugly letters,” she said. “I want them to stop.”
“What kind of letters?” The raw hatred in Colleen’s eyes, so like Adam’s, made Olivia feel sick.
Brenda seemed almost smug. “Whatever’s happening, you’ve brought it on yourself.”
This was hopeless. Olivia understood their pain and grief, but that didn’t give them the right to torment her. “I don’t want to go to the police,” she said as calmly as she could, “but if this keeps on, I’ll be forced to.”
Colleen crossed her arms over her chest. “You do whatever you have to.”
“I will.”
* * *
The visit had been a waste of time. She found Thad pacing in front of the tile store, hands shoved in the pockets of his three-thousand-dollar—she’d checked—Tom Ford leather jacket. He stopped walking. “That didn’t take long. How did it go?”
“Great. They fell on their knees begging me to forgive them.”
“I like it better when I’m the sarcastic one.” He reached out as if he intended to hug her then let his arm fall back to his side. “Let’s get going. I’m driving.”
This time she didn’t fight him.
* * *
“Sing for me,” he said, as they passed the sign for Scotch Plains on their way back to Midtown.
“I can’t sing now.”
“No better time. You’re mad, but it won’t take long before your overworked guilt engine kicks in, and you’ll be right back where you were. Let me hear you sing before that happens.”
“I know you want to help, but this isn’t as simple to get over as an interception or an incomplete pass.”
“Just as I suspected. You know more about football than you pretend. And there’s nothing simple about an interception. Now stop stalling and sing.”
She emitted a pained sigh and then, to his surprise, began to sing. A piece so mournful he wished it weren’t in English.
“When I am laid . . . am laid in earth . . .”
Despite its maudlin subject, the notes she produced were so round and rich they could only have come from the throat of the best in the world.
“Passable,” he said over the constriction in his own throat when she finished.
“It’s ‘Dido’s Lament’